In the words of James Catton, the greatest football writer of his time, “Fred Spiksley’s control of the ball, his individuality, and his pluck for a man of modest stature, without much weight, were amazing. He did all his ball work with the outside of the right foot. In fact, Fred Spiksley could do almost anything he wanted with either foot, and was a sure marksman. Spiksley as a football player was a wonder.”

Ernest “Nudger” Needham, who was to win 16 England caps while at Sheffield United, was part of the Staveley defence that lost 10-0 against Spiksley’s Gainsborough in 1891. “Our captain told me to shift from left to right to stop the outside-left,” he recalled. “I might as well have tried to stop the wind. The outside-left was Fred Spiksley, the finest outside-left I have ever met and whose dribbling was a treat to watch. He could either combine with the others and make openings by lively centres, or cut past the back on the inside to go for goal himself. He could also shoot with either foot. I shall never forget Freddy’s dazzling wing play in 1898, when England beat Scotland 3-1. Ah, Fred was a gem of a player in those days!”

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Ambrose Langley, widely known as Mick, was the hard man of Sheffield Wednesday’s defence for many of the years Spiksley spent scoring and creating at the other end. “For what he did for Wednesday, the club ought to erect a monument in his honour,” he wrote in 1925. “There was one thing Fred used to do extraordinarily well and that was making friends with the opposing defenders. In the friendliest way he would point out to them that they were all in the game to make their living and how rough play really did nobody any good. [Then] he would tie them up with his juggling and dribbling. Cunning fellow! He could pull the wool over their eyes. A great feature of Fred’s play was his ability to keep the ball close to his toe while dribbling, and I have never seen a man who could stop and start again so quickly as Spiksley. He was not a hard shot, but invariably accurate, and his skill made such openings that high-powered efforts were unnecessary. Spiksley made Wednesday, and Wednesday without Spiksley was not very much, I can tell you.”

Spiksley’s use of the outside of the foot was one of the things that set him apart. “The muscles which are brought into operation when the inside of the foot is used to kick a ball are not nearly so strong as those controlling the ‘outside kicks’,” he wrote. “As a consequence with the inside of the foot will tend to slow up when reaching its objective. This slowing-up process is fatal, as it will allow opponents to get to the ball before the colleague for whom the pass was intended can do so.”

Spiksley top-scored for Wednesday six times and managed precisely 100 league goals for them in all, and 170 in all competitions. They were a non-league side when he joined, but with him in the team they won the Second Division, the First Division and the FA Cup, with Spiksley scoring twice in the 1896 final. There were also seven England caps, though there is some confusion about precisely what he achieved with them.

Fred Spiksley, middle row far right, with his Wednesday team in 1891. Photograph: Spiklsey Family Collection

Official records suggest he scored five international goals in all, of which two came against Wales on his debut in March 1893. But Spiksley certainly believed he scored three, and on that occasion the Guardian’s report backs up the player’s account. Either way, that performance earned him a place in the 22nd annual match against Scotland in Richmond the following month. The game was considered to rank alongside the FA Cup final as the season’s most prestigious, with an appearance earning each of the participants a treasured blue cap. Again he is officially credited with two goals, but remembers scoring three – “the first two I scored from Billy Bassett centres, and the third I scored following a quick one-two to set me clear”.

The match reports in the Guardian, Observer and the Times – and for that matter the Sheffield Independent – all say that Rob Smellie cleared that third effort, and Jack Reynolds drove in the rebound. But that is inconclusive, as all the match reporters also admit that they couldn’t see very much. “Probably not a quarter of the 20,000 people present could see the whole field of play,” wrote the Guardian. “Strong exceptions were taken to the arrangements made for the reporters,” wrote the Observer. “A view of the game was extremely difficult to obtain.” The Times wrote that “some of the press must have been greatly hampered in their work”, the Sheffield Independent complained about “a lack of courtesy and consideration upon the part of the officials of the Football Association”, and the Aberdeen Journal considered the media facilities “a disgrace to the Association, and an insult to the press”. Their problems did not end with the poor view: Cricket and Football Field, whose description of the second half in that evening’s edition was barely more than a sentence long, wrote that “the totally inadequate telegraphic arrangements at Richmond account for the paucity of our report. The delay of the wires is scandalous”.

It seems quite possible, particularly given that England scored four goals in a 5-2 win during a 10-minute second-half spree, that some or indeed all of the journalists would have entirely missed crucial incidents, and cobbled together an approximate account. But whether he scored three times that day or only twice, it is clear that by any standards Spiksley’s playing career was brilliant. But it was only when it ended, cut short by a knee injury sustained in a pre-season friendly in 1903 (an injury that was to come in handy a few years later, but we’ll come to that), that he became truly fascinating, coaching teams around the world, acting with one of the greatest movie stars of all time, and engaging in daring wartime escapes from enemy territory.

In 1906 he responded to a newspaper advert seeking former footballers to appear in a new show being put together by Fred Karno. Karno was the greatest theatre impresario of his day, specialising in comedy – he is recognised as the inventor of the custard-pie-in-the-face gag – and simultaneously running a series of shows on both sides of the Atlantic. Spiksley duly joined the cast of the Football Match, which was described by the Era, a newspaper focused on the theatre, as “a mirth-provoking burlesque of the popular game” and proved a massive hit, touring for several years. The drama focused on a cup final between the Middleton Pie-cans and the Midnight Wanderers, and the attempted bribery of the Pie-cans’ goalkeeper. Spiksley was one of three former professionals involved, helping out in particular during the action sequences. “The function of this trio was not to give an exhibition of the game,” wrote the Era. “They added a touch of realism, and served to give the play just a suspicion of definite form.”

During the run Karno gave a young actor a chance to play the man who attempts to do the bribing, in what was his first speaking part in a professional production. The actor was Chas Chaplin, soon to become better known as Charlie, whose elder brother Syd was also part of Karno’s crowd. Chaplin, incidentally, did well enough to be offered a key role in another Karno show, Jimmy the Teacher. He rejected it, forcing Karno to further prove his talent-spotting nous by casting another youngster, Stan Jefferson. A few years later Jefferson, having adopted the surname Laurel, was to join Chaplin in gaining movie stardom.

Fred Spiksley, far right, during a match for Wednesday against Sheffield United. Photograph: Andy George via Spiklsey Family Collection

Karno clearly did not see a similar future for Spiksley, and acting was to prove a brief interlude in a coaching career that took him to the United States, Peru, Mexico, Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden. He won league titles in the last two countries, with Nürnberg and AIK Stockholm respectively, and had a period in charge of the Swedish national team. Like many once-great players, he had little patience for his less skilled and dedicated charges; though the Swedish newspaper Idrottsbladet reported that he was friendly and popular, in Germany he earned the slightly puzzling nickname of Fred Spiegelei, or Fred Fried Egg.

He was coaching in Nuremburg in August 1914 when the first world war broke out and a decree was issued to arrest and imprison any foreigners in Germany aged between 17 and 45. Spiksley was six months shy of his 45th birthday. “We were placed in solitary confinement, and the treatment we received was terrible,” he wrote. “We were bullied about by the warders. One piece of black bread, almost uneatable, and water was the only food I had for four days.”

Now who is having the advantage of my lifelong experience? Other countries! It hurts to be teaching players to beat us

Fred Spiksley

With the assistance of the American consulate his wife somehow arranged his release and the family boarded a train to Lindau, which sits just across Lake Constance from neutral Switzerland. Once there, however, Spiksley was told that, as a man of fighting age, he would not be allowed to leave the country unless a military doctor assessed him and declared him unfit for service.

“Having, years gone by, suffered from an injury to the right knee, I knew that with the aid of a liberal supply of hot water I should be able to dislocate it, although at the time it was in perfect condition,” he said. “Accordingly I got up early next morning and spent two hours applying hot water to the joint. When I went in to the doctor he commenced measuring my muscles, and as he found everything was right I began to lose heart. But then he asked me if I could run, and I said that if I ran a little way the knee slipped out. He asked me to show him, so up I got, and after going a little way pretended that the knee had gone out. I then sat down and made as if I was putting it in again, whereas I was really putting it out. Then I stood up on the other leg and put the right knee in and out several times, and the joints cracked so loudly that the doctor promptly granted me the required certificate.”

Spiksley returned to Sheffield and spent the remainder of the war working as a munitions inspector, walking to and from work, a distance of some 37 miles a day. Peacetime brought a return to coaching, and even another stint at Nürnberg. He had several unconventional opinions about football. Foremost among them was his reluctance to use the inside of the foot – “In my humble opinion,” he once said, “it is only the outside of the foot that a football can be properly controlled with” – but he also believed that a player’s ability as a marksman relied heavily upon the shape of his legs. “Shooting is more or less a gift of nature,” he wrote. “If a player is lucky enough to be born with legs of the right shape, shooting will come easily to him. Straight legs with a tendency to bend slightly inwards at the knee are the correct shape.”

He also argued that the best way to guarantee that teams played football in the correct manner, concentrating on passing and movement, would be to declare a ban on headers. “It is time to come out of the skies and get to earth,” he wrote. “At least three-quarters of the play should be carried through with the feet. Cute footwork is being sacrificed and lost to the game. In order to recreate football I would introduce a law which would reduce a great deal of head-play. I would make a law – punishable with a free-kick – whereby no player is allowed to head a ball coming direct from one of his own side.” It was a complicated rule, whereby heading would be permitted in the penalty area, or after the ball had bounced, or from set pieces, or from a rival’s high pass. “The law is much more easy to understand than the offside rule,” he argued. “I am convinced that if such a law were introduced the game would yield real football-combination and real dribbling, while many lost tricks would reappear.” Such a law was not introduced.

Over time Spiksley developed what he described as “as near a perfect system of teaching football as it is possible to get”. But he found few takers in England, where an unhappy two-year spell at Fulham was his personal pinnacle. “Eventually the conditions I had to work under became impossible,” he wrote of his time at Craven Cottage. “Soon I was up against the old order to the players to ‘sling the ball about’. Now who is having the advantage of my lifelong experience in football? Other countries! These European countries are still far behind England generally at present, but what the case will be in 20 years’ time I cannot say. It hurts to be teaching players of other countries to beat us at our own sport.”

He saw particular potential in the players of Germany. “Football is going ahead here, and sooner or later England will require her very best amateurs to hold their own in matches with this country,” he wrote. “The goalkeepers are fully up to English standard, for I have seen some grand custodians out here.”

In the late 1920s, complaining that he had “met with no encouragement in England with my specialised training system”, he decided to “persevere, but through another source”. This involved a series of instructional films for Pathe Sound Magazine, believed to be the first ever football coaching videos. “I hope eventually to carry this further,” he wrote, “by giving lectures with these films in schools.”

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He did more than that, taking a full-time position as coach at King Edward VII School in Sheffield. In 1933 he attempted to launch a school of his own, with a focus inevitably on football. He got as far as locating premises, and putting out a public plea for interested parents to get in touch, but clearly not enough of them did so. “Fred Spiksley’s great passion is his burning desire to coach young footballers,” the Sheffield Green Un reported in 1936, when Spiksley was 66. “It is a pity that no club in the country has used his knowledge and football experience. The sports editor has previously questioned whether the current season’s ‘coaching stunts’ were years behind Spiksley’s coaching methods and the development of ball play and his techniques that have been so successful throughout the world. What a tragedy that his services have not been used.”

Spiksley needed no one’s assistance to pursue his other great passion, for horse racing. As a boy he had dreamt of becoming a jockey, but in the end his only active involvement came in the shape of compulsive gambling. He only got into football after he was fired from his apprenticeship as a compositor for skipping a day’s work to go to the races, and it was not the last time his hobby had a significant impact on his professional life. When he applied to become Watford’s manager in 1907 Wednesday’s secretary, Arthur Dickinson, wrote in his reference that “if you can get him to give up his on-course horse racing activities you will have secured an excellent football manager”. He refused Watford’s request that he do so – “What I do in my private life is of no business to my employers,” he told them – so they gave the job to someone else. But if he was unable to spend his entire career at the racecourse, he was certainly able to spend his retirement there. In July 1948, as a heatwave sent temperatures soaring into the mid-30s, a 78-year-old Spiksley took ill in the Tattersalls Enclosure on Ladies Day at Goodwood, and died. His last bet, on Auralia to win the 3.10 at odds of 9-2, was a winner.

If you still want more, an excellent biography, Flying Over an Olive Grove by Clive Nicholson, Ralph Nicholson and Mark Metcalf, was published last year (spiksley.com). Guardian readers can get a 25% discount using the code Guard1893. A documentary is also in the works – visit spiksley.strikingly.com for more information.